Next, things which shrink the overall system image. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but I don’t want to wait for updatedb to index unneeded files. I don’t want to wait for xapian on systems on which I never use it. I don’t want to wait for apt-get upgrade to upgrade any of these packages when I don’t use them.

Wily Werewolf was released yesterday and with it manynewthings out of the box.

My favorite feature is something that is silly, simple, a tiny patch, and speeds up something I do often.

I work in the cloud and that means I am deploying new machine images many times a day. Anything to speed this up is something that I want.

In Wily, add-apt-repository now has a -u switch.

-u, –update Update package cache after adding

You’ll notice everywhere on the internet where add-apt-repository is used, the next line of instructions is `apt-get update`. This refreshes the package cache for ALL of the configured apt repositories. On a slow machine with slow IO or slow network, this can take more than just a few seconds, possibly a minute or two. This is too long to wait.

The -u option solves this problem. Not only does is remove the need to `apt-get update` by automatically doing it, but it only fetches the package cache for that newly added repository saving much time.